Vote down?

“Tabular forms exist in the UI world as standard widgets – any spreadsheet uses them, javax.swing, some colour pickers. Why can the designers of JAWS not comprehend these issues?”

Maybe because they have not yet been presented with tabular data in which header information and content have effectively been matched one to the other.

You mention spreadsheets (which would be the logical basis for understanding double-entry tables): in Excel for instance you still have headers displayed as bold, and there’s no more information than that available. It’s still strongly based on visual experience and I’m not sure anywhere in any of the UIs you mention the information is structured enough for any tool to infer that ‘this is a two-entry spreadsheet widget’.

Add to that the fact that up until recently tables were so abused for HTML layout and that should give us a hint as to why assistive technology developers haven’t looked any further into these issues. They already have so much to tackle, I’m afraid.

This article is very inspirational, I had never thought of formatting forms that way.